Our society is driven by service providers that provide an infinite number of services to thousands, if not millions, of customers throughout the United States and the world. These service providers are consistently striving to bring- their customers more choices through improved services. While the services provided by various entities may be as different as night and day, service providers all have one thing in common: the need to bill customers. Although developing new ideas to improve services may be exciting and enjoyable, the cumbersome task associated with billing customers can be time consuming and overwhelming. Perhaps even more daunting for large and small entities alike is the problem of liquidity associated with waiting for customers to pay for services rendered. When a service provider assumes the tasks of billing its customers, the service provider is only paid when individual customers decide to pay their account. Thus, the service provider has assets in the form of accounts receivable but not in available cash.
Bill processing entities have come to the rescue of many service providers that want to save time and increase liquidity. Generally, a bill processing entities can save service providers time by processing customer bills, mailing bills to customers, and receiving payment from customers. Bill processing entities can also increase service providers' liquidity by purchasing accounts receivable, thereby reducing the time that service providers have to wait before receiving cash assets for services rendered to customers.
Typically, when a service provider enlists the services of a bill processing entity, the service provider is paid for accounts receivable according to the billing cycle of each account. Generally, the service provider is only paid for accounts receivable payable in a given billing cycle, e.g. the current billing cycle. Accounts payable in a subsequent billing cycle are generally stored in the bill processing entity's system until the account's billing cycle is current. Therefore, the bill processing entity must have the ability to track customer accounts so that when an account's billing cycle comes current, the service provider is paid accordingly.
Bill processing entities have conventionally tracked customer accounts by separating customer accounts into categories based on the account's billing cycle status. For instance, there could be a category for accounts payable in the current billing cycle, a category for accounts payable in a future billing cycle and a catch-all category for any accounts that could not be placed in any other category.
Dividing customer accounts into different “tracking” categories makes it easier for processing entities to determine how much an individual service provider should be paid and when the payment should be made. On the other hand, dividing customer accounts into different categories makes it more difficult for the bill processing entity to detem˜ine whether the bill processing entity has accurately processed all the service provider's accounts receivable.
Bill processing entities have a variety of methods to reconcile the accounts receivable submitted by service providers with the accounts receivables processed by the bill processing entity. Prior to this invention, one such method involved printing all the accounts receivable data for a given service provider from each tracking category. The bill processing entity would then manually reviewed each account receivable and calculated the total amount of processed account receivable using a simple hand-held calculator. After reviewing and adding thousands of account receivable entries, the bill processing entity compared the total amount of pre-processed accounts receivable submitted to the processing entity with the total amount of accounts receivable processed by the bill processing entity.
The best case scenario occurred when the total pine-processed accounts receivable equaled the total processed accounts receivable. In such cases, the bill processing entity could assure itself and the service provider that the bill processing entity had processed all accounts receivable submitted. However, it is not uncommon for the total pre-processed accounts receivable not to equal the total processed accounts receivable. Such inconsistencies threaten the reliability and efficiency of the bill processing entities' system.
Prior to this invention, when the total pre-processed accounts receivable did not equal the total processed accounts receivable for a given service provider, the manual calculations described above had to be repeated to determine if human error was the source of the discrepancy. If the discrepancy was not due to human error, but instead occurred in the way the data was received from the service provider or in the way the bill processing entity processed the data, finding the real source of the problem could be substantially delayed. Prior to this invention, the time lost in locating the source of errors often resulted in delays in payment to service providers, or overpayment to service providers. In many cases, delays in payment resulted in the bill processing entity paying late fees to service providers. In addition, when the processing entity underpays the service provider, the processing entity may have to pay a penalty fee.
Human error and delay are major concerns when manually performing the tedious, yet highly important function of balancing pre-processed accounts receivable with processed accounts receivable for a given service provider. Moreover, the man-power needed to manually perform the tasks of balancing pre-processed and processed accounts receivable is costly and inefficient to say the very least. Thus, there is a need to automate the task of tracking and balancing account receivable data submitted to bill processing entities.